Trump Slaps Motorists with Ethanol Costs

The Trump administration acquiesced to the ethanol lobby in a recent decision on the costly Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), says the Wall Street Journal. Under a Bush-era 2007 law, the mandated amount of biofuels in your gas tank is increasing, which puts upward pressure on gas and food prices and likely harms the environment.

Rather than supporting repeal of the anti-environmental RFS, the EPA announced it “won’t reduce its proposed 19.24 gallon biofuels quota for 2018, and many even increase it,” said the WSJ. Sadly, the administration “caved under pressure from the ethanol lobby and political extortion from Republican Senators Joni Ernst, Deb Fischer, and Chuck Grassley.”

At DownsizingGovernment.org, Nicholas Loris explains how the RFS harms consumers, damages the economy, and produces negative environmental effects. The RFS is also a bureaucratic nightmare, and has spawned a complex credit-trading system, which investor Carl Icahn said is a “$15 billion market full of manipulation, speculation and fraud.”

Loris notes that ethanol has only two-thirds the energy content of regular gas, so drivers get fewer miles per gallon the higher the share of ethanol and other biofuels mixed into their tanks.

So the next time you are pumping gas and see that “10% Ethanol” sticker, remember it’s a Big Government swindle perpetrated by the GOP.